Forbidden Lie$

Those would be the alleged lie$ of Norma Khouri, whose 2003 book Forbidden Love, about an honor killing in Jordan, was shown to contain so many falsehoods—er, facts changed to protect the innocent—that its status as nonfiction defies any rational definition of the term. The paradox of a documentary like this is that it lavishes further attention on a person who was possibly just seeking attention to begin with—the film indicates that Khouri is in all likelihood a serial fabulist from the South Side. But Forbidden Lie$ doesn’t flinch, trailing Khouri to Jordan as she attempts to prove that everything she wrote has at least some correlative in reality. As a dizzying volley between filmmaker and subject, it’s compulsively watchable.

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